How fast does electricity travel? For example, if you have a 1000 foot long wire, from point A to B, how fast will it take the electricity to go from point A to B?Does electricity travel at EXACTLY the same speed as light?

Or is it a little bit slower?

Does anybody know the EXACT speed of electricity?

Thank You

Schneibster

18th February 2006 - 06:57 AM

Light is a propagating electromagnetic field in open space. The speed of light is the speed of propagation of the electric and magnetic fields that make up the light.

But the speed of light in open space is one thing, and the speed of an electromagnetic field inside matter, in this case a wire, is another; it's slower. That's because it interacts with all the atoms in the matter as it moves along. Each interaction takes a brief moment in time, and the electromagnetic field isn't moving while it's interacting.

Now, these interactions are very, very fast- they don't slow the electric field down very much, no more than a few percent. So the speed of electric current through a wire is very close to the speed of light in a vacuum, but just a bit less.

Remember that it isn't a matter of electrons moving from one end of the wire to another; instead, the electromagnetic field moves through the wire, making electrons jump from one atom to the next, and then another electron from that atom to the next, in a wave. That's how electricity moves through a wire.

You can approximate the speed of light as about a foot per nanosecond. That means if you have a 1GHz Pentium chip in your computer, in the time it takes for it to complete one cycle and execute one machine instruction, the electricity that's making it work has time to move about a foot.

The exact speed of the electromagnetic field through a wire depends on the exact composition of the wire, and on its thickness, and on whether it's in an electromagnetic field from the Earth, or from other wires around it, or from a magnet somewhere nearby, and so forth. So there's no exact answer to give to your question; it depends on the circumstances. But the approximate answer is, it's very, very close to the figure you quoted, just a few percent short of it.

bbobbage

18th February 2006 - 07:06 AM

Thank you very much Schneibster.

How about this then: If that 1GHz Pentium chip used optical methods to execute the machine intstructions instead of electronic methods, will its speed be very much faster? Would'nt this be so since light would not be affected by electromagnetic fields? Would it then become perhaps a 2 GHz chip or even faster? Or would the speed of the processor not be enhanced very much?

Schneibster

18th February 2006 - 09:28 AM

It would only make a few percent difference; the point of using optical chips isn't because light can move faster than electricity, because for all intents and purposes it can't. The point of using optical chips is that they can make them smaller, which means fitting more onto a single wafer; that makes them both less expensive and faster, because they're closer together.

When I was in the industry, 1GHz was a dream; now they're making chips that run at more than 3GHz. I have a pair in the system I'm writing this on. But there was concern at that time that we were getting pretty close to the diffraction limits of visible light; you have to understand that chips are made using photolithography, which means that the smallest line you can draw is limited by the wavelength of light you're using.

Visible light is relatively safe; if someone gets exposed, they'll probably be OK. But in order to get below about .25 microns line width, you have to use ultraviolet light. This presents two dangers: first, ultraviolet light can burn you, and second, you can't see it. So you could be exposed, and it would burn your retina, and you wouldn't know for a while, a few minutes maybe- and then all of a sudden you're blind. The liability implications of this are a major problem. Safety is a huge concern in chip-making; you have to get insurance to run a chip factory, and the more dangerous stuff you have around, the harder it is to get insurance and the more expensive it is once you get it.

Now, there was talk about using photolithography processes with visible light that used diffraction or perhaps interference to make lines smaller than .25 micron. And if that's what they're doing, then well and good; but at some point, you are going to reach the limits of that method too; and then you have to go to ultraviolet.

There are other problems with ultraviolet; it's higher-energy, so it can damage the silicon. Not much point in making chips that don't work because the very light you're using to make them damages them, right? Worse yet, a lot of glass is opaque to UV. So how do you focus it, how do you reflect it, and how do you use it to make chips?

ETA: I just went onto Intel's site. They are involved in a consortium that has actually produced a deep UV (they are calling it "EUV," Extreme UV- of course, gotta get that "X" in there so everybody gets all excited and buys, buys, buys) chip production plant, including DUV photolithography. Their current process is 65nm (that's 0.065 microns- about one quarter the size I was working with of 0.25 micron) and they project being able to go below 20nm with that technology. So it looks like they've figured out a lot of the problems.

But if you can use light, then a whole bunch of science will let you do things that you can't do with silicon; the only problem is, those things are science, not technology the way making silicon chips is. We have decades of experience making silicon chips, and no experience at all making whatever we'll have to make to use light instead of electricity. So it's not something that's going to be happening any time soon. But we'll have to go there eventually; we'll have no choice. I'm guessing it's a decade or more away, though. By Moore's Law, the current DUV technology appears ready to take them at least that far.

Haunted07

2nd July 2007 - 04:40 PM

I was reading a article in NewScientist.com about how Electric signals can be transmitted at least four times faster than the speed of light. Now also it has said we can send light signals faster the speed of light over a few meters. But only with the aid of complicated and very expensive equipment. The article said that physicists at middle Tennessee state University have broken that speed limit over distance of nearly 120 meters. By using 120-meter-long cable by alternating six- to eight-meter-long lengths of two different kinds of coaxial cable, each with a different electrical impedance. Then hooking them up to two signal generators, one of which broadcast a fast wave, the other a slow one. The waves interfere with each other to produce electric pulses, which can be watched using an oscilloscope. Now any pulse, whether electrical, light or sound , can be imagined as a group of tiny intermingled waves. The energy of this “group pulse” rises and falls over space, with a peak in the middle. The different electrical resistance in the hybrid cable causes the waves in the pulses rear to reflect off each other, accelerating the pulses peak forward. Using the oscilloscope to trace the pulse strength and speed, the confirmed they have sent the signals peak tunneling through the cable at more than four billion kilometers per hour. Now that it was only the peak moves faster than light speed and not the total energy of the pulse does not . doesn’t that show that we are one step close to breaking Einstein’s relativity theory.

Bryn Richards

2nd July 2007 - 05:51 PM

I read that electrons travel at 1/3 light speed, in a vacuum. However, when they are in a wire, and there are collisions and interactions going on like crazy, then that speed is significantly reduced, albeit still fast enough so that when you turn on a switch, your clock lights up pretty much instantly

yor_on

2nd July 2007 - 07:10 PM

That's a cool experiment you're describing Haunted07, but if i got it right it was made inside a coaxial cable? C is defined as a photon's speed traveling through space and according to Einstein it seems to be an absolute velocity. Nothing can go faster than that. If you're talking about electricity you just have to read Schneibster's postings to see that it will be slower. and if you let light go through any other medium (glass water gas) then the photons speed will slow down and physicists will time after time prove that they can make f ex light go faster through that medium than it normally are supposed to do. There is a very nice thread about phase velocity or group velocity by Guest_carbonlife at http://forum.physorg.com/index.php?showtopic=6487It discusses why even though 'something' might seem to travel faster than light the information doesn't.

Enthalpy

3rd July 2007 - 01:12 AM

I basically agree with light and electricity in a cable propagating at similar speeds, one being made slower by the refractive index and the other by permittivity and permeability - which in fact build the refractive index at higher frequencies.

I disagree with refraction or permittivity being caused by absorption and delayed emission. It seems that a popular textbook spread this false idea. No delay here, it's the instantaneous permittivity that does it.

Electrons travel in vacuum at any speed between zero and C, both limits excluded.In a metal, electrons travel very slowly, but their interaction very quickly.

Now, optical chips: That's less simple.Optics would waste much room on a chip, as guides must be half a wavelength wide or thick (at medium's speed): Say, 200nm instead of today's 50nm wires. Clearances are even worse.

But within a chip (not on the board between the chips), electrical signals are slow. This is because propagation speed is limited by the resistance of the metal tracks (combined with their capacitance) much more than by their inductance. This makes for a speed much smaller than light, and for propagation times that increase as the square of distance. Worse, this time isn't reduced by better and smaller fabrication processes, because thinner conductors increase the resistance: This explains why processor frequencies haven't increased since the Pentium 4, and are currently decreasing with the Core 2.

Optical signal paths will be faster within chips since resistance doesn't affect them. This issue is so crucial to chips today that the industry invests a huge research time in it (it's difficult because silicon is the right material for data processing but the wrong one for light emitters) and chip designers are ready to lose precious room on the chips to accommodate optic buses at least for some long signal paths.

From propagation time, optics would enable to regain the frequency increase we missed for over 5 years, which means a lot. Then we would need to dissipate the heat produced by faster chips - or make smaller chips with the same computing power.

yor_on

3rd July 2007 - 01:49 PM

Sorry Enthalpy. I Did not mean it to sound that if there was definite proof that electricity in its 'purest' form couldn't move as fast as light. Tell me, to what do you define this 'instantaneous permittivity' that are 'slowing' emissions? this resistance. Why shouldn't absorption be included?

Enthalpy

4th July 2007 - 01:46 AM

Permittivity slows electric signals (or light, as it increases the refractive index) by increasing capacitances. There is no delayed photon emission mechanism here.

Slower transmission is different from losses. Silica of a fiber slows light by a factor of 1.5 but still carries light over the length of Australia without needing a repeater.

causality

4th July 2007 - 03:13 AM

Wouldn't you have to have a better understanding of what electricity actually is to answer to question at hand?

What is electricity? I don't believe anyone really knows. Sure, there are theories, but no solid proof.

At what voltage does electricity actually approach the speed of light? Is it 1 volt? 250k volts? How much voltaic pressure,(difference potential) would it take to alter the speed of electricity?

Does an electron need the presence of a proton to generate 'electricity?' You bet your ***.

Pretty sure that electrons travel very slow, at least they do in my plasma ball, which is nitrogen injected. Which brings up the fact that the presence of matter is required for electricity, where light requires no matter to travel in empty space.

These are 2 separate energies. It's my opinion that integrating light and electricity too close together in an effort to understand either is counterproductive in understanding their intricacies.

professor andy

7th July 2007 - 10:31 PM

Hold the phone dudes!

What word on "drift velocity"????

I was lead to believe that electrons move pretty dam slow! It's only cause they shunt each other along (like train cars) that it appears to move fast..

Or are ye's talkin purely waves or some other exotic shizz?!

jetmuzer

23rd November 2007 - 09:12 AM

i think electricity travel speed depend from wire

meBigGuy

23rd November 2007 - 10:55 AM

QUOTE

What is electricity? I don't believe anyone really knows. Sure, there are theories, but no solid proof.

At what voltage does electricity actually approach the speed of light? Is it 1 volt? 250k volts? How much voltaic pressure,(difference potential) would it take to alter the speed of electricity?

Does an electron need the presence of a proton to generate 'electricity?' You bet your ***.

Pretty sure that electrons travel very slow, at least they do in my plasma ball, which is nitrogen injected. Which brings up the fact that the presence of matter is required for electricity, where light requires no matter to travel in empty space.

These are 2 separate energies. It's my opinion that integrating light and electricity too close together in an effort to understand either is counterproductive in understanding their intricacies.

1. We know what electricity is. It is the flow of charged particles. Voltage is joules per coulomb. That is, energy per bunch of particles. Energetic particles exhibit a higher voltage. generally we think of flow of electrons. Electrons travel slowly through wire. The effect of the voltage travels quickly. Kind of like turning on a hose. Or pushing on a pipe full of ping-pong balls. The actual drift speed of electrons through a 0.5mm wire carrying 5 amperes (5 coulombs per second) is about 1mm per second. Remember that electric current can also be due to the flow of ionized molecules (like in a lead acid battery) or positively charged particles (protons, for example)

2. The voltage has nothing to do with the speed of electricity through a wire. The velocity of propagation (look that up on wikipedia) is determined by the inductive and capacitive characteristics of the wire carrying the electricity. Generally a copper wire is about .75c or less. Light in a vacuum is 1.014ns per foot. But, maybe that is not the question you are asking.The speed of electrons through free space is affected by their energy, therfore their voltage. A 30,000 volt CRT accelerates electrons to about 0.3c.The stanford linear accelerator accelerates electrons to .9999+c at 51 GeV

3. A traveling electron constitutes a current, and therefore produces an magnetic field. I consider a traveling proton to be a traveling charge also and therefore it will produce a magnetic field.

4. An electron beam is electricity (like in a CRT monitor or TV set) and that electron beam constitutes electricity. A traveling electron IS electricity, in and of itself. Electricity (electrons) can travel through a vacuum so matter is not required.

5. The electrons in your plasma ball travel pretty fast. The patterns they make change "slowly", but the electrons are pretty quick (maybe .01C, assuming 3,000 volts). Not something you can see.

Electricity is about current flow. There is a difference between current flow and electromagnetic fields. Current flow causes electromagnetic fields. Light is electromagnetic radiation. So, yes, keep them separate.

DavidD

23rd November 2007 - 11:46 AM

Speed of light is ~3*10^8 m/s and speed of electricity is at least 2.8*10^8 m/s. They are almost equal...

meBigGuy

24th November 2007 - 04:11 AM

QUOTE

Speed of light is ~3*10^8 m/s and speed of electricity is at least 2.8*10^8 m/s. They are almost equal...

What sort of nonsense is that? Where do you get this stuff?

What I said about the speed of electrons in a CRT is spot on. In that case the speed of electricity is 1 x 10^8 m/s. In other electron beam cases it is much slower.

As for propagation in a wire, the velocity of propagation in solid polyethylene dielectric coaxial cable is 0.66 which is 2x10^8 m/s. In other cables it can be as slow as 50%.

If you look at transmission line theory you will see that the velocity of propagation is 1/sqrt(k) where k is the dielectric constant of the insulating medium.

DavidD

24th November 2007 - 09:22 AM

QUOTE (meBigGuy+Nov 24 2007, 04:11 AM)

If you look at transmission line theory you will see that the velocity of propagation is 1/sqrt(k) where k is the dielectric constant of the insulating medium.

Electricity speed don't depending on dialectric it is or not.

meBigGuy

24th November 2007 - 10:39 AM

I see

Then this must be wrong (from wikipedia)

QUOTE

Velocity of Propagation (VoP) or velocity factor is a parameter that characterizes the speed at which an electrical signal (e.g. radio) passes through a medium. Expressed as a percentage, it is the ratio of a signal's transmission speed compared to the speed of light in vacuum. Thus, transmission in a vacuum would have a VoP of 1 (100%). VoP equals the reciprocal of the square root of the dielectric constant of the material through which that signal passes

Velocity of Propagation (VoP) or velocity factor is a parameter that characterizes the speed at which an electrical signal (e.g. radio) passes through a medium. Expressed as a percentage, it is the ratio of a signal's transmission speed compared to the speed of light in vacuum. Thus, transmission in a vacuum would have a VoP of 1 (100%). VoP equals the reciprocal of the square root of the dielectric constant of the material through which that signal passes

or from http://www.epanorama.net/documents/wiring/..._impedance.htmlWhat about the velocity of propogation ratio ?Velocity of propogation ratio percentage based on the speed of light in vacuum. The percentage tells what is the speed of the signal in the cable compared to the speed of light in vacuum. In coax cable, under reasonable conditions, the propagation velocity depends on the characteristics of the dielectric material.

Go anywhere you want. I am correct. Thousands of sites say the same thing.

DavidD

24th November 2007 - 11:31 AM

You know that I say you, this dialectric ratio at least is 0.99999 Take now square root

meBigGuy

24th November 2007 - 12:01 PM

WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG

Do you even bother to read? WOW --- You say the strangest stuff with so much incorrect information. Where do you get this stuff?

Do I have to post EVERYTHING? Do I have to explain EVERYTHING?

In some cables the speed of propagation is below 50%. I suppose you could build cables that are even slower.

You are SOOOOOO wrong. Just look at the different velocities on the wikipedia velocity of propagation site. Go to any cable site.

QUOTE

A signal travels in a transmission line at much lessthan this. In twisted pair cable the velocity of propagation may be between 40% and 75% of thevelocity in free space

Some special cables get up to 90%

DavidD

24th November 2007 - 02:43 PM

Whatever, 3*10^8 m/s or 1.5*10^8 m/s is not big diferent... But I still doubt that velosity in dialectrics depend on resistivity. If say dialectric is 1Mom, when what spped of electricity is milion times slower than speed of light in vacum?

PJParent001

24th November 2007 - 10:56 PM

speed of electron dependent on property of conductor

DavidD

25th November 2007 - 08:51 AM

QUOTE (PJParent001+Nov 24 2007, 10:56 PM)

speed of electron dependent on property of conductor

speed of electron is not speed of electricity

meBigGuy

25th November 2007 - 09:25 AM

QUOTE

Whatever, 3*10^8 m/s or 1.5*10^8 m/s is not big diferent... ?

Right --- you were wrong and now try to trivialize it. I guess 50% is not a big difference in your world. Try designing antennas with that kind of error.

QUOTE (->

QUOTE

Whatever, 3*10^8 m/s or 1.5*10^8 m/s is not big diferent... ?

Right --- you were wrong and now try to trivialize it. I guess 50% is not a big difference in your world. Try designing antennas with that kind of error.

But I still doubt that velosity in dialectrics depend on resistivity.

I don't understand what you mean. Who said anything about resistivity?

QUOTE

If say dialectric is 1Mom, when what spped of electricity is milion times slower than speed of light in vacum

I cannot parse that sentence. It isn't English. try again

Are you mixing up dielectric constant with resistivity or resistance? See

I have been talking only about dielectric constant. resistance can have timing effects in circuits, but that does not mean the effects of electricity moved slower.

speed of electron dependent on property of conductor

That is true, but as DavidD said the speed of an electron is not the speed of electricity in a conducting medium.

JLThornton

30th November 2007 - 04:17 PM

Electricity travels as two components - the electrical impluse and the magnetic field that accompanies it. The electical impluse travels through the wire, but the magnetic field travels through the medium that surrounds the wire. Neither component can travel faster than the other; the effective propogation speed is going to depend on the "slowest" wave. That is why the dielectic coefficient of the medium surrounding the wire is important; although electrons can zip through copper wire at nearly the speed of light, the magnetic wave cannot zip through other substances (e.g. rubber tubing, circuit boards, dirt, etc) as fast and the electical impulse cannot "outrace" the magnetic.

There is a wonderful article that talks about the phenomenon with respect to circuit and transmission line design - google "propagation speed critical length" and look for an article from ultracad (as new member, I'm apparently not allowed to post links

As the author notes, if you have a wire suspended in midair over a lake, and a second wire underwater, the current in the wire under water will travel almost 9 times slower than in the wire suspended in air due to the dielectric co-efficient of water (which, for those that like conceptual metaphors, is subjecting the magnetic field to drag or resistance or friction or whatever floats your conceptual boat).

JLThornton

30th November 2007 - 04:33 PM

After reading my own post, don't want anybody to think I'm trying to say there are two waves - there aren't - but the field does have two components and either component can be affected by the media it travels through, and the wire by itself is not the only media that a complete electromagnetic fields travels through.

meBigGuy

1st December 2007 - 09:39 AM

QUOTE

although electrons can zip through copper wire at nearly the speed of light,

careful, The actual electrons travel very slow. (drift velocity)

Thanks for the good example, the dielectric constant of water being 80. That would have shortened the discussion with DavidD by a few posts I just used real numbers from cables, which are pretty similar.

JLThornton

5th December 2007 - 04:46 AM

QUOTE (meBigGuy+Dec 1 2007, 09:39 AM)

careful, The actual electrons travel very slow. (drift velocity)

Ah, you're right; very poor choice of words on my part.

ehal256

12th December 2007 - 02:42 AM

QUOTE (Bryn Richards+Jul 2 2007, 11:51 AM)

I read that electrons travel at 1/3 light speed, in a vacuum. However, when they are in a wire, and there are collisions and interactions going on like crazy, then that speed is significantly reduced, albeit still fast enough so that when you turn on a switch, your clock lights up pretty much instantly

It's a bit more like this, yes the actual electrons move far slower than the speed of light inside a wire, but the reason it still turns on so quickly is because the magnetic field in the wire instantly reaches the other end, no matter how slow the actual electrons are traveling.

The speed of electricity (particles) travels at all most half the speed of light (particles) for many good reasons, which is explained by other people posts in this forum.

meBigGuy

23rd December 2007 - 03:57 AM

QUOTE

The speed of electricity (particles) travels at all most half the speed of light (particles) for many good reasons, which is explained by other people posts in this forum

Seems to me to be wrong, no matter how I parse it.

Firstly, the Speed of Electricity is not speed of particles

Also, Wrong for speed of electrons (which can be accelerated to nearly light speed).

Can you give a specific example that illustrates what you are actually trying to say.

Engineer_Dave

2nd January 2008 - 02:22 PM

Hi

I think we are talking at cross purposes. Something no-one has mentioned is Ac or DC? If AC, what frequency? Does it matter? Hell, yes.

Anyone on this thread claiming that electricity always travels at 50% or 90% of c is laughably way off and must have made it up. or read it on another website which made it up! Stating things in this way demonstrates a gross ignorance.

When we say SPEED of electricity, are we talking about speed of electrons, or propagation time along a conductor? Big difference.

With AC, especially up into the GHz, conductor properties, as well as their relationship with surrounding conductors AND the properties of the materials in between (eg as in coax cable) ALL have a SIGNIFICANT effect on the propagation time of a signal.

When designing circuit boards using dielctric material with a constant of abou 4.2, a rule of thumb is that SIGNAL (not electrons) travels at about 50% of c. BUT, change the parameters, and the outcome will also change.

walkingman

3rd January 2008 - 11:38 PM

All very interesting but do electrons move along a electric cable ? or are photons transmitting the "pulse wave" if you switched on a 1 kilometer cable and had a "super duper " high speed camera you would see the the cable thev heat travel alone as the "pulse wave" progressed" just a thought

meBigGuy

4th January 2008 - 07:55 AM

@Engineer_Dave

QUOTE

Anyone on this thread claiming that electricity always travels at 50% or 90% of c is laughably way off and must have made it up. or read it on another web

Try reading the posts. All that has been covered. Nice way to start.

QUOTE (->

QUOTE

Anyone on this thread claiming that electricity always travels at 50% or 90% of c is laughably way off and must have made it up. or read it on another web

Try reading the posts. All that has been covered. Nice way to start.

With AC, especially up into the GHz, conductor properties, as well as their relationship with surrounding conductors AND the properties of the materials in between (eg as in coax cable) ALL have a SIGNIFICANT effect on the propagation time of a signal.

All that has been covered.

QUOTE

When designing circuit boards using dielctric material with a constant of abou 4.2, a rule of thumb is that SIGNAL (not electrons) travels at about 50% of c. BUT, change the parameters, and the outcome will also change.

When designing circuit boards using dielctric material with a constant of abou 4.2, a rule of thumb is that SIGNAL (not electrons) travels at about 50% of c. BUT, change the parameters, and the outcome will also change.

@walkingmanAll very interesting but do electrons move along a electric cable ? or are photons transmitting the "pulse wave" if you switched on a 1 kilometer cable and had a "super duper " high speed camera you would see the the cable thev heat travel alone as the "pulse wave" progressed" just a thought

Yes, electrons move slowly (at drift velocity)along an electric cable. Yes, charges transfer energy through exchange of virtual photons (at velocity of propagation). Sure, the cable would heat up to the extent it had losses. The slow rate of heat transfer up through the cable would make it difficult to actually image anything, not to mention other issues. (like a camera to resolve ~2ns or faster per foot when light travels at 1.014 ns/foot). An exposure every foot would mean a frame rate of 500MHz. Based on the amount of energy being radiated in infra red you could maybe guess at the number of photons per 500Mhz exposure.

Here is a camera that will do exposures at 200Mhz (5ns), but they don't say how many frames they can do at 200Mhz given the internal data transfer rates and internal memory. I was actually surprised to find one so fast. But it isn't for infra red, I'm afraid.

Engineer_Dave

18th January 2008 - 01:40 PM

MeBigGuy:

Thanks so much for your welcome!

I do read all the posts, but started skimming over yours as they seemed to veer away from the topic and started focussing on how everybody was "WRONG, WRONG, WRONG"

You then go on to pose the conundrum "Do I have to post EVERYTHING? Do I have to explain EVERYTHING?"

It seems the answer is YES. Even if just to fill time in your life. See if you can make sense of the following equation....

1319 posts / 6months = n0 g1rlfr1end?

sextheorist

18th February 2010 - 02:44 PM

QUOTE (JLThornton+Nov 30 2007, 04:17 PM)

Electricity travels as two components - the electrical impulse and the magnetic field that accompanies it. The electrical impulse travels through the wire, but the magnetic field travels through the medium that surrounds the wire. Neither component can travel faster than the other; the effective propogation speed is going to depend on the "slowest" wave. That is why the dielectic coefficient of the medium surrounding the wire is important; although electrons can zip through copper wire at nearly the speed of light, the magnetic wave cannot zip through other substances (e.g. rubber tubing, circuit boards, dirt, etc) as fast and the electical impulse cannot "outrace" the magnetic.

There is a wonderful article that talks about the phenomenon with respect to circuit and transmission line design - google "propagation speed critical length" and look for an article from ultracad (as new member, I'm apparently not allowed to post links

As the author notes, if you have a wire suspended in midair over a lake, and a second wire underwater, the current in the wire under water will travel almost 9 times slower than in the wire suspended in air due to the dielectric co-efficient of water (which, for those that like conceptual metaphors, is subjecting the magnetic field to drag or resistance or friction or whatever floats your conceptual boat).

Thank you very much...... ur post helped me a lot to understand what is speed of electricity......... so i made a kind of analogy to understand this.... Think of a wire or cable as a line of ladies standing shoulder to shoulder to each other. And their hips are electrons. They have a ability to shake their hips from left to right. Now when a man slaps a booty of a lady at the extreme left. she shakes her hip to the right(quickly) and hits the left side of hip of the lady on right side of the first lady. now this makes the second lady to shake her hip to right side and hence transferring the shaking movement to the lady(third in the row) on her(second lady's) right side. this process keep on happening and ultimately to the lady on the extreme right. and the speed at which the transfer of this hip shaking process gets from extreme left to extreme right is speed of propagation. and hence the energy is transferred through booty shaking..

while the hips of the ladies remains at the same position or move very slowly.when ladies(as whole) move to their right hand side while shaking their hips. the speed at which they move is drift velocity. And this velocity is related to current in some way. i forgot the formula....

boit

19th February 2010 - 04:46 AM

Hi all. I just like to thank all of you for this very interactive and informative discussion. Those links were superb. True we have google and Wiki but never could i have entered propagation electromagnetic velocity di electric in one search. PS. Not to ruffle some activist/feminists' feathers lets use the long cat with tail in LA New York analogy. And of course just the tail and the head for wireless communication.

Lars Tuff

19th March 2012 - 09:34 PM

QUOTE (DavidD+Nov 23 2007, 11:46 AM)

Speed of light is ~3*10^8 m/s and speed of electricity is at least 2.8*10^8 m/s. They are almost equal...

I think the whole field is a mess. Speed of neutrinios have been calculated in the Cern experiment to faster than light speed. This speed cannot be explained by Einsteins relativity.

In the mid 1920s two scientists, Goudsmidt and Uhlenbeck, calculated the rotation speed of electrons (ortorotation) to 1,7 times the speed of light. This result has never been proven wrong.

This means that at least two things in the universe travels faster than light. One thing is one thing, it's an exeption. But two exeptions, come on?

Another common example is the speed of sound trough a cupper (or silver, gold) wire. The transfer is immidiate. This has something to do with ressonance. It cannot be explained by particle theory. Sound does not travel in the form of photons in a cupper wire. This is not simply the transfer of a single unit of charge (1 electron), nor is it a magnetic wave travelling through the wire (which would be much to slow).

The speed of light is, like the speed of sound, an imaginable barrier. There are phenomena that travels at c2, c3 and so on. I am convinced of it. How else can it be possible to move across the wastness of the universe in the future? If a sound or an image then, can travel faster than light through a cupper wire, utilizing ressonance, through a though and hard, impenetratable medium, why is this not possible in near vacuum (out in the universe)? Electricity is surrounded by magnetism, mass is surrounded by gravity. We shoud not be looking for a graviton, just as futile as to be looking for a magnesion (=particle that gives an object magnetism). They are dual phenomena.

Why are black wholes immense in gravity, and still singularities? Is it because they are full of gravitons? Come on.

We need a fresh look at the world, free of dogma and accepted (and failed) explanations. The comnplicated and special-case driven physics of today is too narrow. Earlier, in the start of the 1900s, particles and phenomena were infered and predicted on basis of small and simple experimets, nowadays, nothing is 'true' before it has been accelerated near the speed of light in the LHC at Cern.

Well the world is bigger and much more interesting than even that big machine would have us believe. Search for unexplained, simple phenomena instead, that no theory or equation fully can explain. Herein lies the mysteries that will give a paradigm shift. Remember Einstein, proving and measuring the size of atoms by studying pollen in water. A simple experiment. Rutherford finding the size and positive charge of the unimaginable small nuclei of gold atoms.

Is it so strange that a big electromagnet (like the sun) bends solar rays? After all, electrons, much bigger particles, will be bent by a electromagnetic field, as the crt shows us. Like all moving particles, photons are waves and partiles, and they are surrounded (like electrons and neutrons) by a field or flux, of a particular form - this field can be subject to alterations, and therefore light itself can be altered. Is this because of the curvature of spacetime or is it because photons are moving particles with flux and spin, subject to external influence?

Einstein once asked himself what will happen if i sat on a particle of light. I can tell him one thing: He would be spinning faster around the photons axes than he moved forward. He would be hopping up and down in a frenzie. A bumpy ride. The rollrcoaster of the century. No surprise if his head would be spinning, and his hair would look like it actually did.

So do photons, like electrons, posess the quality of ressonance? Of cource. So if electrons (moving at 2-3 cm per sec) can assert forces with the speed of light to other electrons in a cupper wire, how fast then is the transfer of ressonance between two particles of light (photons) in a near vacuum? Immense. Nearly no oposite or disturbing forces. Nearly no pause in syncronicity. So what then of neutrinos? How fast could a signal of immense complexity be sent with these particles through the wastness of space? Just imagine.

AlexG

19th March 2012 - 11:39 PM

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Speed of neutrinios have been calculated in the Cern experiment to faster than light speed

That was due to an equipment malfunction. When they corrected it, the speed of the neutrino was c, to within the limits of error.

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Speed of neutrinios have been calculated in the Cern experiment to faster than light speed

That was due to an equipment malfunction. When they corrected it, the speed of the neutrino was c, to within the limits of error.

In the mid 1920s two scientists, Goudsmidt and Uhlenbeck, calculated the rotation speed of electrons (ortorotation) to 1,7 times the speed of light. This result has never been proven wrong.

The Bohr model of the atom has been discarded. Electrons do not orbit the nucleus, they exist in a probability cloud around the nucleus. So the result they calculated is wrong, based on an incorrect model of the atom.

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This means that at least two things in the universe travels faster than light. One thing is one thing, it's an exception. But two exeptions, come on?

There are no exceptions to c as the speed limit found yet.

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This means that at least two things in the universe travels faster than light. One thing is one thing, it's an exception. But two exeptions, come on?

There are no exceptions to c as the speed limit found yet.

Sound does not travel in the form of photons in a cupper

Photons have nothing to due with sound. It's a completely different mechanism.

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If a sound or an image then, can travel faster than light through a cupper wire,

It doesn't. If you want to claim it does, you'll have to supply a reference.

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If a sound or an image then, can travel faster than light through a cupper wire,

It doesn't. If you want to claim it does, you'll have to supply a reference.

Is it so strange that a big electromagnet (like the sun) bends solar rays

The sun is not an electromagnet.

There's no point to continuing. Every point you make in your post is incorrect.

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